Girls in Boys' Cars

by Felicity Castagna

  ‘Hello, Rosa. Thank you for calling again,’ she says, and I begin.

  ‘You know she loved to brush people’s hair. She was really good at makeovers and stuff but it wasn’t really about that. This one time at school, there was a year seven girl in the bathroom crying when we walked in and her hair was all scrunched-up and messy in this rubber band at the back of her neck, and Asheeka, she just walked right up and stood next to her at the mirror, pulled out her makeup case and started putting on her lipstick and her eyeliner and whatever like she couldn’t care less about this girl, but then she turns to her and says, I know high school kind of sucks but it gets better. Anyway this girl ignores her and keeps on crying until Asheeka leans over and touches her lightly on the shoulder and says, How about I fix up your hair? And Asheeka doesn’t wait for an answer, she just leans over and starts pulling apart this girl’s messy bun and combing her hair out with her fingers, and then the brush, and then she keeps brushing this girl’s hair, slowly and carefully, one stroke after the other as if it was the most fragile object in all the world, until some of the sadness drained out of that girl’s body and finally she had something to say: she said thank you to Asheeka’s reflection in the mirror and then she left and you just knew, you know, that she was going to be all right.’

  ‘I used to do that,’ Asheeka’s mum says. ‘When she was a kid I would brush her hair for hours. I miss that. She used to tell me stories. I didn’t care as much about her hair as she thought I did. I just liked the stories.’

  The warning bleep is so loud that it’s no use trying to say much else. ‘Talk later’ is all I get in before the phone goes dead. Six minutes. Time’s up.

  I place the phone back down on the receiver and walk towards the TV on the other side of the common room. The TV looks like something that belongs in a science museum. It’s made of clear plastic, except for the screen, so that we can’t hide anything in it, one of the other girls explained to me once. I look at the transparent plastic and think about messages in bottles, the kind that stories tell us wash up on the shore from faraway lands.

  Dr Phil is on the television. No one likes going to see their own counsellors but everyone in here loves watching celebrity psychologists on TV. It’s never as entertaining when you’re the one on stage. Dr Phil has a teenage boy on one side and his furious father on the other. He’s pointing straight at the camera and saying sternly: Every one of us has things that we believe about ourselves when nobody else is looking, nobody else is listening, nobody else is monitoring what we’re doing.

  It’s hard to hear over the three girls playing cards in the corner, trying to one-up each other with stories about the dumb things they did when they were high.

  Most people stay away from me. ‘Just tell everyone that one of your charges was attempted murder,’ Tracey told me. ‘Most juvenile offenders who do that get sent to the adult prison. That’s a pretty big deal around here. They won’t bother you.’

  ‘But I didn’t really,’ I tried to explain. ‘The charge was Reckless Indifference to Life but they dropped that charge in the end, that’s how I could come to this place.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  I didn’t tell anyone, but Tracey must have done me the favour. When I walk into the room, I’m like Moses parting the Red Sea. Everybody goes left and right; there’s just me and nothing else in the middle.

  It’s only Azadeh who will come hang with me and she doesn’t say anything. This morning she comes and sits next to me, not quite next to me but about a metre away – that’s Azadeh’s version of ‘next to’. She always smells sweet, even at a distance, like Pears shampoo. It’s not the kind of place where everyone smells so sweet, you know. There’s always a few days between the soap in the bathrooms running out and it being replaced. Other than that you have to buy deodorant and whatever at the commissary and, truthfully, I think some girls just don’t care even if they can afford it.

  So, Azadeh is here and so is Dr Phil when one of the guards delivers the mail. He stands at the front of the common room calling out last names and everyone pretends they can’t be fussed if they get anything, even though anything from the outside is basically the most exciting thing in here.

  I can see that one of the things he’s holding is a book. There’s no surprises here. They unwrap your mail for you, read it, sometimes even dip it in chemicals to make sure that it hasn’t been dipped in acid and you’re not going to stick it on your tongue and attend your own private rave without ever leaving your cell. When he calls my name, I’m hoping it’s that book that’s mine and, lucky me, it is.

  The book is called One Thousand and One Nights. On the inside there’s a dedication, typed on a bookplate and glued onto the inside cover. Rosa, this book is about a woman who tells stories to stay alive. I thought you’d like it better than the last one.

  Azadeh takes it from me and I watch her turn it over and over in her hands. ‘Infinite stories,’ she says. ‘My mother always said the English translation of that title is wrong. It’s not One Thousand and One Nights – it’s meant to be a story that goes on forever.’

  ‘You’ve read this?’

  ‘Some bits.’ She looks up and smiles as Dr Phil yells, How’d that work out for you? ‘My mum said it was banned in her country, so, you know, I had to give it a go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She said it was corrupting.’ I watch her run her fingers over the intricate gold patterns on the front cover. ‘Can I borrow it sometime? Can’t get any more corrupted at this stage.’

  We both look up towards Dr Phil and everyone in the room claps along with the audience on the TV as they go wild. It’s just a thing they all do in here. No one knows why.

  EAT, PRAY, LOVE

  We turned back. On the road back to Jindabyne we watched people travelling in the opposite direction being stopped by people in giant yellow suits shaking their heads. By the time we got back to the centre of Jindabyne most of the roads out were blocked off with giant signs screaming Closed. Turn Back. Fire Danger in neon lights.

  That’s how Jindabyne, a sleepy little town outside of the snow season, suddenly became all packed out. It was backpackers mostly, the people in vans, camping people. They got kicked out of all those valleys and parks and quiet places in between the trees because somewhere out there was a fire that no one could see but everyone could smell. It’s hard to describe the vibe – there were all these young people, fit people, hiking people, people who drink stubbies on camping chairs in front of tents for weeks on end, and with all those kinds of people together the place should have been bursting with kids running everywhere and local boys trying to pick up tourists at the pub, but everything was subdued, quiet.

  When we drove into the parking lot of the local shops, I guess the police thought we were backpackers too. They pointed across the road to a large square building that had the word Backpackers in red letters that were larger than people and said, ‘All camping, all sleeping in cars, in vans, has been banned tonight. You’re going to need to find accommodation or head to the evacuation centre in Cooma.’

  Neither of us liked the idea of an evacuation centre. We wanted to be here near the trees and the mountains and the possibility of NYE parties. When the man behind the desk at the backpackers asked for IDs I was staring at the poster of two missing girls behind his head. It wasn’t us, but I was wondering if we did exist like this somewhere, if the police or our parents or even Arnold might have ripped a picture off our Instagram feeds that could be sitting on the blank walls of buildings or in car parks in random towns we’d never heard of.

  ‘We don’t have IDs,’ I said. I was searching for a reason why when Asheeka turned the corners of her mouth down and said, ‘We lost them when we were evacuated quickly from the mountains.’

  He shook his head and seemed to know what we were talking about even if we didn’t. He looked sadly at the TV sitting on his counter, the one that was saying most of Australia was burning. Was that even true? Ashe
eka and I hadn’t been paying attention. We were from the land of apartment blocks, not these thousands of acres of flammable browns and greens, and besides, we’d left our phones back at the hotel in Canberra and we’d never been in the habit of getting our news from anywhere but our social media feeds. I realised how much the world had just kind of slipped away. It wasn’t the same kind of disappearing I usually did but it was still a kind of vanishing.

  The guy at the backpackers gave us a couple of beds in a dorm out the back.

  We spent the afternoon dozing on the couches in the communal room. Neither of us had ever met a backpacker before. The closest we’d ever come to backpacking was when I read Eat, Pray, Love and explained the storyline to Asheeka. ‘She gave up everything,’ I kept saying while Asheeka eyed me suspiciously over sandwiches at the school oval. ‘She had this really nice husband and a great job and she was like, my life still sucks, so she went off to Italy and learned Italian and ate pizza all day long and then she lived in India and meditated with a guru and slept on floors and then she went to Bali and hung out with a medicine man and found a lover with a really sexy foreign accent.’

  Asheeka and I had talked about it a lot after that. She liked the idea of just getting up and leaving without any real reason for doing so (but I guess, in retrospect, that’s what a lot of people said about me . . . and maybe they were even right).

  We watched the movie once. I remember Asheeka summarising the whole thing like this – ‘So she just goes off hanging out with strangers from all around the place and that’s it. No one ever tells her no.’

  In the kitchen at the backpackers we ate a lot of the food out of the ‘free for you to take’ basket that was on the counter and in the fridge – random muesli bars, peanut butter and slightly stale bread. That’s where we met Paula, an Irish backpacker, possibly stoned, who told us about a NYE party that a bunch of travellers were heading off to down by the lake. She took a bunch of things no one else would eat out of the free-to-take basket and shoved them in her pockets. ‘You are totally welcome to come,’ she said about four times as though she had completely forgotten she had just made the offer a few minutes ago. I was thinking to myself that both Elizabeth Gilbert and Paula had those same things going on: the blonde hair and the big smile and that kind of casual easiness, like any hardness that came their way could be forgotten pretty quickly.

  By the time we left for the party it was dark. Asheeka wasn’t sure that she was wearing the right thing. I was pretty sure that you needed to look casual because the party was outdoors, like you were going to a BBQ or something, but Asheeka thought that we should dress up more because it was New Year’s Eve. The only dressy things we had were those outfits we left home in that night we stole the car, they were scrunched up in balls in the corner of the boot, like leopard-print relics from another life. It seems crazy, thinking about it now, that we were even worried about dress codes when the world around us was about to explode on so many literal and metaphorical levels.

  We made our way to the party in those same dresses we’d once abandoned in the back seat after our shopping spree. I locked my arm in Asheeka’s and we walked like we would have walked to a party back home, except this didn’t feel nearly as stressful. We didn’t know anyone there, but that also meant there was no one to impress.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m trying not to think about it really. I mean, I do think about it a lot but I also try to block it out of my mind. Like my mum: I’m sure she’s probably hysterical by now and I kind of want her to be, but don’t want her to be at the same time. I want to just be able to take off like that Gilbert woman. Imagine being her, she just completely abandons everyone who cares about her and now she’s like a woman superhero.’

  ‘Is it that simple?’ I said. I was trying to work it out for myself.

  ‘It is to me,’ Asheeka insisted. ‘We’re just – I’m just not the kind of person who can get away with it, but for now, I’m just trying to live here, completely in the moment.’

  ‘Isn’t that what Gilbert says when she’s in that place in India?’

  ‘There are so many germs in India,’ was all Asheeka said before we turned down a path and into a clearing next to the lake, which was all lit up by the lights of the pub we were in last night and the high-beams of campervans and industrial torches stuck into the sand. The sky over the lake was all smoke. All those different lights shone through it in columns so that you could see it drifting there like brown clouds in those glass tubes we had in science class at school. Someone played guitar. Someone else sang and it felt like we were all grown up and transplanted into another much more sophisticated land than our own.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Asheeka, and she squeezed my hand and I knew that she was seeing what I was seeing, that we were walking into a kind of adulthood that wasn’t our own.

  We walked over and sat down on the fringes of the circle. A girl with a long brown plait falling between her shoulder blades scrunched herself backwards to let us in, and I could see from her face that she was older than her hair suggested – maybe thirtyish.

  ‘Hey, ladies,’ she said to Asheeka, and we both said, ‘hey’ at the same time and it made me feel kind of immature and teenagerly and I was embarrassed, and I could tell Asheeka was too by the way she looked at her knees, but the girl with the plait didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You guys travelling?’ she asked, sucking on a beer and looking up at the sky.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘big road trip. Like, right across Australia.’ Asheeka quickly turned from her knees and looked at me right in the eyes.

  ‘Yeah, Australia,’ she repeated to the air.

  Then the girl with the plait started listing off all the places she’d travelled through. ‘Been on the go two years. Left England, went to China, then Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, New Zealand, Fiji, Australia.’

  This was what they all seemed to do when anyone introduced themselves – list a résumé of all the places they’d ever been. It was hard to know what to say back. Asheeka and I had basically only been a few places between here and Parramatta.

  ‘I went to Fiji once,’ Asheeka told her.

  ‘What was that like?’

  ‘Boring. You know, we were out in the village the whole time with my grandmother.’

  That seemed to interest her a lot. ‘Out in the village. Awesome. You got the authentic experience then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Asheeka replied. ‘Really boring.’

  When it got darker, when we’d all had a lot to drink, that’s when things started getting more interesting. No one seemed to need to describe their travelling résumés anymore. Asheeka and I played frisbee with two German guys who sang along to AC/DC as it blared out of a bluetooth speaker.

  More people showed up all the time. They were everywhere, giggling on the kids’ merry-go-round, stripping down to their underwear and dive-bombing into the lake, lying on the grass just staring up at the sky.

  I have to admit the reason I failed to catch the frisbee that last time Leon threw it to me was because I was looking at his bare chest too hard. Not really even as a kind of sexual thing but because I’d never been up that close to a man’s body – a grown man’s super body, the type you see in magazines with all the muscles down their stomach. Anyway the frisbee went out into the river and behind a rock somewhere and then it was gone. Leon smiled and held up his hands and said, ‘I guess that’s that then,’ and offered to get us a couple of beers before he wandered off to his esky.

  I sat down on the grass and watched Asheeka walk over near the fire, where she spun around and around, palms reaching upwards to the sky, moving her body in a way that seemed too unselfconscious to be her.

  It only lasted a minute or so but I’m glad I saw it. She stopped when she caught me looking at her, sat on the grass next to me and watched the lake. There was a woman in there, floating on her back alone, almost completely still except for the small mo
ments when she would stretch out her fingers and then her arms and draw lines in the water.

  ‘Look,’ Asheeka said, followed by that phrase that I still toss around and around in my head. ‘She’s completely alone but completely all right with it.’

  Someone began to yell ten, nine, eight . . . and Asheeka looked at me startled . . . five, four, three, two . . . she grabbed my hand and squeezed it into the next year.

  Sometimes, here in the centre, when it’s finally quiet at night after a few of the girls have yelled, Good night, I love you! to someone on the other side of the wall and someone else has told them to fuck off and one of the guards and has come through and threatened us all with an even earlier bedtime tomorrow if we don’t shut up, sometimes in that silent space I recreate that scene in my head. I picture that line where the lake meets the sandy shore, the spot where Asheeka sits, her knees pulled up underneath her chin, her eyes staring straight at me, and I think of the woman floating in the lake that night in Jindabyne and I picture Asheeka there, her feet moving in the grass to the sound of someone playing guitar, her arms up in the air, her body turning and turning.

  LAKE EUCUMBENE

  The next morning we sat in the small courtyard behind the backpackers, drinking tea from metal mugs and picking the dirt from our fingernails. It should have been bright by now but the sun was blocked out by grey smoke everywhere and it looked more like the dusk before night falls. Everything smelled like a fireplace.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this,’ Asheeka said.

  ‘Of course we’ve never done anything like this,’ I reminded her.

  ‘No, not the thing with you and me and the car. This. Just sitting on a bench, staring out into the sunshine. There is always so much to do at home, you know? I don’t even really need to brush my hair here. I can just hang.’

  I watched a thin brown bird pick at something in the grass and I thought of how when I was younger Mum and Nan and Pop and me used to hang at Parramatta Park when Dad was at work, throwing the leftovers from our peanut-butter sandwiches at the birds. ‘Do you think we should call home now?’